Jay Werkheiser on “Tepid War”

Jay Werkheiser discusses the ideas behind “Tepid War,” his latest short story, which depicts a world where war has become a mundane part of everyday life. Read “Tepid War” in our [January/Fenruary issue, on sale now!]

“Tepid War” was one of those ideas that just hit you out of nowhere. We’ve all seen news stories about drone strikes on terrorist leaders in places like Syria, and too often we’ve also seen stories of the civilian casualties that go along with those strikes. Technology has continued to improve, though, and it’s not terribly uncommon to see reports of attacks that took out some bad guy or another with incredible precision. The advent of smart ammunition–bullets that can correct their course on the fly–promises even more precise attacks in the future.

There has always been popular backlash, and rightly so, when civilian casualties are excessive. As drone technology improves and we gain the capability to launch more and more accurate strikes, it occurred to me that the general public will become less tolerant of collateral damage. Projecting to the future, could we reach a point where drones are so accurate that civilian casualties could be completely eliminated? Could we reach a point where nations are expected to fight wars with such caution that not a single civilian is injured? Where a single civilian casualty would be enough to make a nation a pariah? How would that change the face of warfare?

At first, the idea seems utopian—no longer would civilian populations have to fear guns and bombs. But a science fiction writer’s job is to look beneath the surface, to dig until you find something unexpected. If political and military leaders can order strikes with the assurance that even in the most crowded city the destruction can be precisely pinpointed, then everywhere becomes a battlefield.

Military infrastructure is difficult to separate from civilian populations. Without an industrial base, there are no tanks and rockets and shells. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were military targets; the goal wasn’t to wipe out tens of thousands of civilians, they were just in the way. The military and industrial infrastructure is what had to be destroyed. In the middle east right now, Hamas’s terrorist network is entwined with civilian infrastructure. Going after military targets leads to civilian death and suffering and the public backlash that follows.

Now imagine a world where drones and smart ammunition have become so good that enemy forces could be destroyed without harm to the civilian infrastructure. Where drones can be dispatched to damage the enemy’s war industry without harming a single worker. Where drones defending the factories can duel with attacking drones on a city street while businessmen casually walk along the sidewalks, assured that they are safe.

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Could we reach a point where nations are expected to fight wars with such caution that not a single civilian is injured? Where a single civilian casualty would be enough to make a nation a pariah? How would that change the face of warfare?

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Sounds great, except what happens to society when war becomes mundane?  When the biggest danger posed by an enemy attack is a traffic jam that makes you late for work? I had inadvertently stumbled onto the thematic ground explored in the Star Trek original series episode, “A Taste of Armageddon.” That episode was a product of the Cold War, with nuclear weapons hanging heavily over the public consciousness. Tepid War is a product of modern day warfare driven by advanced robotic technology. But the conclusion remains the same–if you remove the horror of war, there’s no incentive to avoid it.

So “Tepid War” envisions a dark future where war is so mundane that people just walk casually through battlefields, their only worry that it will cause traffic delays. The story idea came to me as a vivid image–a businessman walking casually down the street as robotic drones fired bullets all around him. From there it was just a matter of fleshing out the characters and their conflicts. Incidentally, I finished the first draft of this story a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. I follow international politics enough to know even then that Russia would really like to get their hands on Ukraine and China has their eyes on Taiwan. In writing a story that is essentially about World War III, it seemed reasonable that those two places would be the flash points to set it off. So I included a line early in the story about strikes against Russian troops in Ukraine, mainly as a means of grounding the story in reasonably realistic detail. At the time, no one besides military analysts believed that Russia would actually pull the trigger on Ukraine, and I certainly had no particular insight into it. Sadly, that aspect of the story ended up becoming reality. Elsewhere in the story I mentioned Chinese forces in Taiwan; let’s hope that part remains fiction.

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Jay Werkheiser started writing science fiction stories as soon as he was old enough to put pencil to paper. No one stopped him, so he kept writing, and somewhere along the line his stories became good enough for publication. He writes primarily hard science fiction, but isn’t above the occasional time travel or light-hearted sci-fi comedy. When he’s not writing, Jay teaches chemistry and physics to eager high school students.